Books & Authors

This is a list of other books and authors mentioned in Ignorance with a note of reference.

And Homer goes on:  "As Odysseus spoke, the sun sank; the dusk came: and beneath the vault deep within the cavern, they withdrew to lie and love in each other's arms."

Irena would quote a stanza from Jan Skacel, a Czech poet of the period: he describes the sadness surrounding him; he wants to take that sadness in his hands, carry it off somewhere and build himself a house out of it, he wants to lock himself inside that house for three hundred years and for three hundred years not open the door, not open the door to anyone!

Passing a souvenir shop, she sees in the window a T-shirt showing the gloomy face of a tubercular, with a line in English:  KAFKA WAS BORN IN PRAGUE.  A magnificently stupid T-shirt, it enchants her, and she buys it.

Jonas Halgrimsson was a great romantic poet and also a great fighter for Iceland's independence.

Petofi

In the nineteenth century all of small-nation Europe had these romantic patriot-poets: Petofi in Hungry, Michiewicz in Poland, Preseren in Slovenia, Macha in Bohemia, Shevechenko in Ukraine, Wergeland in Norway, Lonnrot in Finland and the like.

 

 ...  ministers of the brand-new republic had created a cemetery for the great men of homeland; they ripped the poet away from the industrialist and buried him in the pantheon that at time contained only the grave of another great poet (small nations abound in great poets), Elinar Benediktsson.

She reaches a parapet at the end of a little park above Prague: the view from here is of the rear of Hradcany Castle, the secret side: this is a Prague whose existence Gustaf doesn't suspect: and instantly there come rushing the names she loved as a young girl: Macha, poet at the time when his nation, a water sprite, was just emerging from the mists:  Jan Neruda, the storyteller of ordinary Czech folk ... 

Hrabal and Skvorecky, novelists of her adolescence ...

In a scathing letter to Thomas Mann he (Schoenberg) looks to the period "after two or three hundred years," when it will finally become clear which of the two of them is greater, Mann or he!

He was conversing with the greatest Germans, with Bach and Goethe and Brahms and Mahler, but , however intelligent they might be, conversations carried on in the higher stratospheres of the mind are always myopic about what goes on, with no reason or logic, down below: two great armies are battling to the death over sacred causes; but some minuscule plague bacterium comes along and lays them both low